Tag Archives: election

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No “Hail to the Chief”

linda-tripp
By Linda Tripp
Arguably at no time since the aftermath of the Civil War has there ever been a time when unity in America was more critical. In a unique position to facilitate that unity, Hillary Rodham Clinton decided instead to champion divisiveness by actively questioning the outcome of the election.  For those who intimately know and understand the Clinton Playbook, this is business as usual.  There are never any real surprises with Hillary. For the President-elect who has been remarkably magnanimous concerning his erstwhile opponent, this divisive tactic will make his enormous job all the more difficult. And that is precisely the point.

The Hillary many of us know emerged by not emerging on election night. To the dismay of her supporters not only in Manhattan’s cavernous Javitz Center but across the entire country, she was a no show. Her loyal supporters had anticipated a victory, a blow out. All the networks, the print press, the pundits had virtually assured them of this. Yes, the grand fireworks display over the Hudson River had been inexplicably cancelled, but sunshine and lollipops would reign supreme anyway. Her victory was a foregone conclusion.

As election night became early morning, and as their friends at the networks were forced (in abject horror) to call the election in favor of her opponent, her supporters faced not jubilant victory but unthinkable yet indisputable defeat. They faced it alone. As they waited in vain for their candidate to appear, classic HRC is what they got.

Foregoing a gracious and necessary personal appearance, she threw the wily John Podesta out on the stage.  Best known for his emails, this odd choice of stand-in appeared pale, in visible shock and much like a marionette whose tangled strings had a mind of their own. His bizarre appearance left more questions than answers and his shaken performance seemed to suck all the oxygen out of the room. Clinton’s supporters were left with not only morose defeat but also a sense of abandonment as they wandered aimlessly out of the victory hall. As Donald Trump faced the enormity of his win, he gave a heartfelt, humble and gracious victory speech, one which in its inclusiveness was clearly meant to begin our national healing. Hillary’s voters across the country finally went to bed, monumentally let down by all of it. Their mistake was in believing she actually cared about all of them.

All this occurred due to a fundamental Hillary truth: It is first, last and always all about her. Period. It was never about her supporters in the hall or voters across the country. They are routinely forgotten once the votes are tallied and she resurrects their importance only if and when the next election approaches.  They have always been nothing more than a means to an end. They are not living, breathing, feeling individuals.

 

By many reports, on election night this strong glass ceiling breaker was too busy crying inconsolably and pitching a less than presidential fit to give a fig about anyone else. Too distraught to appear, in the end this supposedly strong candidate who proudly touted the gender card became little more than a weak and tired cliché. At the risk of dating myself, she became less “I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar” and more “It’s My Party and I’ll Cry If I Want To,” and exposed once and for all the real woman behind the mask.

Always a bridesmaid, never a bride about sums it up when one looks at this election and that of 2008. Hillary was the odds-on favorite to win both times. In 2008 she couldn’t even clinch the nomination. She considered it stolen. In 2016, her opponent snatched victory from the jaws of defeat and in one fell swoop crushed a coronation. She was resoundingly defeated by an unlikely candidate who never served even one day of his 69 years in government service. It appears she is not quite ready to give up that crown.

Her concession speech the day after the election began her attempt at rebuilding what was fast becoming her tattered legacy.

When she finally appeared, she didn’t congratulate the President-elect, she didn’t throw her support behind him. Instead, she stated the obvious fact that “he will be our next president” and opined that we needed to give him a chance.  After checking that requisite box for any losing candidate, she promptly fell back on her tired refrain of “women and girls” and glass ceilings, offering them hope for the future. While aspirational in its resonance, just about all women not named Hillary Clinton have long since known this artificial glass ceiling had been thoroughly and completely shattered years before.

Countless Presidents and Prime Ministers, world leaders all, have been and are women.  Some going back decades. For the sake of argument, we won’t even consider the female surgeons, pilots, astronauts, CEOs, elected officials and diplomats to name just a few both here and around the world who years later are still picking shards of glass out of their hairdos. Women have long since arrived at the pinnacle of power, they are just named something other than Hillary Rodham Clinton. Apparently they don’t count.

Today we see a machination that many who know Hillary knew to expect. If one wonders if the less than impactful Jill Stein had a little “help” in her quest to challenge the election, wonder no more. That the Clinton campaign has joined forces to ensure “fairness” tells the whole story. Everyone questioned whether or not Donald Trump would accept the outcome of the election.  With the pervasive corruption attributed to his opponent on so many fronts, he was wise to question a potentially rigged system.

But it was a question that if asked of one, should have been asked of the other. In an election cycle that was from all accounts preordained, no one bothered to ask Hillary. It might have been a good idea to run that one by her. On her plane following the debate, she opined on this subject as it pertained to her opponent. She characterized him dismissively in a denigrating way and blathered on about our democratic process, but failed to include herself in this equation. Now we know her answer. As many of us have always known, the rules always apply to everyone else but absolutely never apply to Hillary. We understood she would be the very last one to accept defeat, graciously or otherwise.

The fact is, Hillary Clinton still cannot comprehend or accept what she believes is an inconceivable outcome of the election. She never will. Her likeness was supposed to grace our currency decades in the future. That was the plan. Instead of leaving the national stage with grace and dignity, she is hanging on by her fingernails. This time she is using the inconsequential Jill Stein to do her public dirty work.

Loath to exit the international arena, she will use every trick in the book in what will be a futile attempt to change the outcome of the election. She will not publicly participate, she will leave that to her now defunct campaign, ensuring her minions do it for her. Those minions have their marching orders, and in Hillary’s world, there is not a minion alive who would question her direct order. Not while there is a chance they could change the election and retake the White House.

So as the President-elect conducts a well-disciplined transition and prepares to lead the nation in a matter of weeks, the country will simply have to endure Hillary’s behind-the-scenes temper tantrum. With strains of “Hail to the Chief” echoing silently in her mind, all else pales for Hillary. Unity be damned. She’s going for it. Not for the good of the country. Never for the good of the country. It is for personal achievement, for personal gain, for personal riches. And that’s the gal I know.

Originally posted 2016-11-29 17:10:15.

Current Events, Recent Posts

Election Therapy

Election Therapy From My Basket of Deplorables

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By Maureen Dowd

WASHINGTON — First I had to deal with the president-elect scolding.

During his interview with The New York Times on Tuesday, Donald Trump chided me twice for being too tough on him.

Sitting next to our publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., Trump invited everyone around the table to call him if they saw anything “where you feel that I’m wrong.”

“You can call me, Arthur can call me, I would love to hear,” he said. “The only one who can’t call me is Maureen. She treats me too rough.”

Then I had to go home for Thanksgiving and deal with my family scolding me about the media misreading the country. I went cold turkey to eat hot turkey: no therapy dog, no weaving therapy, no yoga, no acupuncture, no meditation, no cry-in.

deplorablesThe minute I saw my sister’s Trump champagne and a Cersei figurine as the centerpiece — my brother, Kevin, nicknamed Hillary “Cersei” during this year’s brutal game of thrones — I knew I wasn’t in a safe space.

My little basket of deplorables, as I call my conservative family, gloated with Trump toasts galore, and Kevin presented me with his annual holiday column with an extra flourish.

My colleague Paul Krugman tweeted Friday that “affluent, educated suburbanites” who voted for Trump are “fools.” What else is there to say, he asked.

Well, here is what Kevin, an “affluent, educated suburbanite,” has to say in his column, titled an “Election Therapy Guide for Liberals”:

Donald Trump pulled off one of the greatest political feats in modern history by defeating Hillary Clinton and the vaunted Clinton machine.

The election was a complete repudiation of Barack Obama: his fantasy world of political correctness, the politicization of the Justice Department and the I.R.S., an out-of-control E.P.A., his neutering of the military, his nonsupport of the police and his fixation on things like transgender bathrooms. Since he became president, his party has lost 63 House seats, 10 Senate seats and 14 governorships.

The country had signaled strongly in the last two midterms that they were not happy. The Dems’ answer was to give them more of the same from a person they did not like or trust.

Preaching — and pandering — with a message of inclusion, the Democrats have instead become a party where incivility and bad manners are taken for granted, rudeness is routine, religion is mocked and there is absolutely no respect for a differing opinion. This did not go down well in the Midwest, where Trump flipped three blue states and 44 electoral votes.

The rudeness reached its peak when Vice President-elect Mike Pence was booed by attendees of “Hamilton” and then pompously lectured by the cast. This may play well with the New York theater crowd but is considered boorish and unacceptable by those of us taught to respect the office of the president and vice president, if not the occupants.

Here is a short primer for the young protesters. If your preferred candidate loses, there is no need for mass hysteria, canceled midterms, safe spaces, crying rooms or group primal screams. You might understand this better if you had not received participation trophies, undeserved grades to protect your feelings or even if you had a proper understanding of civics. The Democrats are now crying that Hillary had more popular votes. That can be her participation trophy.

If any of my sons had told me they were too distraught over a national election to take an exam, I would have brought them home the next day, fearful of the instruction they were receiving. Not one of the top 50 colleges mandate one semester of Western Civilization. Maybe they should rethink that.

Something for some members of the Dowd family to celebrate their candidate’s victory, and at least one to drown her sorrows.

KEVIN DOWD

Mr. Trump received over 62 million votes, not all of them cast by homophobes, Islamaphobes, racists, sexists, misogynists or any other “ists.” I would caution Trump deniers that all of the crying and whining is not good preparation for the coming storm. The liberal media, both print and electronic, has lost all credibility. I am reasonably sure that none of the mainstream print media had stories prepared for a Trump victory. I watched the networks and cable stations in their midnight meltdown — embodied by Rachel Maddow explaining to viewers that they were not having a “terrible, terrible dream” and that they had not died and “gone to hell.”

The media’s criticism of Trump’s high-level picks as “not diverse enough” or “too white and male” — a day before he named two women and offered a cabinet position to an African-American — magnified this fact.

Here is a final word to my Democratic friends. The election is over. There will not be a do-over. So let me bid farewell to Al Sharpton, Ben Rhodes and the Clintons. Note to Cher, Barbra, Amy Schumer and Lena Dunham: Your plane is waiting. And to Jon Stewart, who talked about moving to another planet: Your spaceship is waiting. To Bruce Springsteen, Jay Z, Beyoncé and Katy Perry, thanks for the free concerts. And finally, to all the foreign countries that contributed to the Clinton Foundation, there will not be a payoff or a rebate.

As Eddie Murphy so eloquently stated in the movie “48 Hrs.”: “There’s a new sheriff in town.” And he is going to be here for 1,461 days. Merry Christmas.

 KEVIN DOWD

Originally posted 2016-11-27 17:34:13.

Current Events, Recent Posts

Alice’s Restaurant

Nearly fifty years ago Arlo Guthrie produced a song that is appropriate to this day for two reasons. First it’s Thanksgiving and secondly, the sorry state of our society.  If you have never listened to the original recording of Alice’s Restaurant, you should. There is a link at the bottom should choose to do so — and you should. Warning, like most of his songs, it is long, but worth the time to sit back, listen, and learn. 

This post is so unbelievable I had to do some research to find out what college, town, city, state, and country would do something like this and here’s what I found. Edgewood College is a private “institution of higher learning” in Madison, Wisconsin which:

continues to be one of the least expensive private colleges and is committed to providing our students:

·         Challenging and engaging educational experiences

·         Small class sizes and personal attention from dedicated staff and faculty

·         An educational experience that connects learning, beliefs, and action.

I found that tuition is quite reasonable  at $13,765/semester , but what does your child get for that? Read the post and you decide.

‘Suck it up p***ies!’ sticky note mocking anti-Trump students being investigated — as a hate crime

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Following the election of Republican Donald Trump to the presidency, one of the ways students at Edgewood College expressed their emotions was by placing sticky notes on a designated table in the commons of the Madison, Wisconsin, campus.

But Vice President for Student Development Tony Chambers informed the campus that someone took that idea and perpetrated “an act of cowardly hatred.”

Seems a sticky note with the message “Suck it up, pussies!” — along with a winking smiley face and a stuck-out tongue — was placed on the inside window of the school’s Office of Student Diversity and Inclusion (what? Someone actually gets paid to run this office, hell I could do that). Chambers called it a “targeted act of intimidation and cowardice” in a three-page letter, which includes an embedded image of what appears to be the sticky note in question.

“A great deal of fear, sadness, and anger among students, faculty, and staff resulted, especially for those that gather in the OSDI space,” Chambers continued in his letter. “The message was hateful and harmful toward members of our community. It violated every value that this institution considers to be at its core.”

With that, Chambers said representatives from campus security, student conduct, human resources, Title IX enforcement and diversity and inclusion gathered to decide “how to address the hateful message.”

“The group determined that the message constituted a Hate Crime, based on guidelines from the Jeanne Clery Act and state law,” Chambers wrote, adding that the school reported the incident to Madison police and that it’s “currently being investigated as a hate crime.”

Chambers also observed that “covert micro-aggressions and overt macro-aggressions appear to have taken on new fervor in higher education since our national election” and that the “frequency, boldness, and severity with which hateful acts have been occurring has, for many, signaled a new era of intolerance, fear, and mistrust in higher education.”

“Let me be clear: These types of acts will not be tolerated at Edgewood College,” Chambers’ letter concluded. “They are inexcusable, and those who have been identified as perpetrators of such acts have no place in our community.” (OMG, the audacity of such people, hang the interlopers, )

 

 

Originally posted 2016-11-24 09:48:45.

Current Events

Last Shot

11 Comments

For the life of me, I cannot understand how someone with a brain they aren’t sitting can be for this woman. The only reason I can think of is that they hate Trump so much they’d vote for for a squirrel to be president. Which means their  voting for a negative reason, not a positive. They simply do not give a hoot about what is good for America. I honestly feel that if the majority of Americans eligible to vote do so for her, I’m living in the wrong country.

On the Brink                                                                          By: Greg Maresca

Tomorrow’s election cannot be overstated as America’s prosperity and global influence lie in the balance making every ballot essential.

Recently, The Wall Street Journal reported that one in five claim they need to learn more about Vice President Kamala Harris. In our fingertip world of unending media, this is hard to fathom. This is the consequence when many get their political acumen from edited sound bites, Tweets and commercials.

Harris’ horizontal climb to headline the Democrat presidential ticket came by not earning one primary vote. Harris and Hillary Clinton both navigated their paths to power primarily through relationships rather than achievement. Harris is the DEI presidential candidate – the turtle on a fence post as there is no way she could have gotten up there on her own. Harris checks more boxes than the token U.S. Customs’ drug dog at the southern border.

Harris likes to claim the one freedom that unlocks all other freedoms is the freedom to vote – when no one voted for her.

Harris’s mother was Indian, her father is a half-white, half-Jamaican, she was raised in Canada and married a Jew. No word if she ever had an abortion but given her ardent support of the gruesome procedure, it gives one reason to pause.

For all the word salads Harris tosses together on the issues, she is clear and concise about abortion. Inflation, illegal immigration, crime – none matter to those who are obsessed with abortion. And no one is more fixated than Harris who flatly rejected any religious exemptions.

As someone who served as an attorney general, Harris knows but won’t admit that there is a fundamental freedom, enshrined in the First Amendment, that guarantees religious liberty, and conscience rights that are the soul of the abortion argument.

Every honest person knows that abortion kills the most innocent among us. Baby showers are proof. Harris is so thoroughly secular that religious liberty means nothing. Harris underscored this at a recent campaign stop when she informed those who yelled out “Jesus Christ is King,” that they needed to find another rally. Harris claims to champion women’s rights, but the facts, which the media purposely obfuscates, tells another story – from rampant sex trafficking at the border to forcing girls to share their bathrooms with boys.

If she loses the election, this will be one of the major reasons why. Harris is not only acting immorally, but irrationally.

There is not a genuine bone in her body and with her incessant eye-rolling, phony accents and nonstop cackle she is best suited as America’s ex-wife than our next president. Harris continues to flip on the issues she could easily find work as a circus acrobat.

Harris chose to be Biden’s vice president after suggesting on multiple occasions he was a racist before she was the first to flame out of the Democrat primary four years ago.

Her campaign went full bore with Biden’s strategy by setting a trail of wine bottles leading to the basement making her a charter member of the Democrats’ Candidate Protection Program.

Harris only qualification is that she is not Biden but will be just as easily manipulated. Harris is being propped up and supported by a complicit and corrupt national media that hates the foundational values and history of the nation she wants to lead.

Democrats called Bush Hitler, then McCain. Romney, and now Trump Hitler. In an election between Harris and Hitler, keep in mind that the Washington Post and the L.A. Times both declined to endorse Harris. The difference between Hitler jokes and a cow is, you can’t milk a cow for more than a generation.

During Trump’s presidency inflation was low, while under Biden-Harris it has soared. Illegal immigration has exploded as has crime. Biden’s record is a catastrophe, and Harris is co-owner of this disaster as vice president. Yet, Harris’ campaign’s number one issue is – abortion. Recently, when questioned on “The View” on what she might do differently over the last four years, Harris was unapologetic saying, “There is not a thing that comes to mind.”

Harris claims she is going to solve the problems she helped to create.

Harris is the most unqualified candidate to run for president in your lifetime, if not ever.

Current Events

Federal Reserve

3 Comments

Another good one from Marine Greg.  As you read this, remember a couple of things. One is the economic definition of inflation in layman’s terms: “Too much money chasing too few goods.” And secondly, one of the truisms I learned in Econ 101 is: Put five Economists in a room and ask them a question, and you will get six answers, all different. Why is that? Because Economics is a social science, not a hard science

 

A Binging Pivot                                                                      By: Greg Maresca

It was one of the most anticipated announcements of Joe Biden’s presidency that was nearly on par with him dropping out of the presidential race and fading to irrelevance.

For the first time since 2020, the Federal Reserve cut interest rates by half a percentage point making the range between 4.75% and 5% with anticipation of more to come.

“The U.S. economy is basically fine,” claimed the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, who made the cut regardless and seemed unconvinced about anything else. To no surprise, the stock market approved following up with record highs.

When deciding on rates, The Fed has always been a reactionary institution that relies on historical data and models like the Phillips curve that was debunked two generations ago. Cutting rates will grow the money supply and bring some relief from higher interest rates. The Fed is putting pressure on inflation to bring down interest rates as the way to manage our exploding deficits.

The rate cut will only fuel inflation – an unwritten and unrestricted tax on everyone – no exceptions.

The interest rate was at a historical average, but the national financial sector and the Washington bureaucratic swamp are addicted to cheap money that makes $50,000 cars and $300,000 homes seem affordable. Over time this money infusion will make those cars and houses even pricier. Believing cheap money is the driving force of economic prosperity is as counterfeit as they come. Such behavior increases demand without an increase in supply – the root cause of inflation. Keep in mind that both food and fuel are excluded from inflation calculations.  This, my friends, is unknown to most Americans. Should food and fuel be added to the inflation number, you would be shocked.

Interest rates are The Fed’s dependent drug.

“When is the next cut coming and how big?”

A half of a percent reduction suggests the economy and its capacity for job creation is not nearly as good as Powell or any other entrenched government bureaucrat will admit.

There was no need for the cut, but lower rates produce lower mortgages and pacifies the masses making them feel better about the current political and economic situation.

The Fed, “a nonpartisan agency,” put its thumb on the scale during a presidential campaign begging the question: Is The Fed an impartial and independent agency or beholden to politics and Wall Street? Lowering rates at the expense of higher inflation seems self-serving in the run up to a presidential election that is less than six weeks away.

Powell, who served as carnival barker for the Biden administration’s highest inflation rates in over 40 years, told us inflation was “only transitory” is doing his best to foster a post-inflation merry go round.

The Fed’s decision is analogous to the hangover coming the morning after a Friday night binger. This economic hangover, however, will conveniently occur after November’s election, so make sure you start your Christmas shopping early as none of this bodes well for glad tidings.

Typically, The Fed cuts rates in response to economic downspin, not because of a supposed stable and growing economy. Provided the economy goes south with rates already low, this only serves to dig the hole deeper.

The real issue that is ignored, dismissed or unacknowledged is the ever-increasing federal spending. Every dollar spent, pilfers a dollar through taxes, borrowing or money-printing. Unless there are cuts to spending and debt reduction, nothing changes diminishing even further the fading American dream.

How about less government and regulation and more innovation and investment to drive the economy.

The cut is all about the election and The Fed’s preferred outcome. It is nothing short of a lame attempt to prop up the incumbent executive branch that would certainly preserve Powell’s job. No need for the bureaucrats to fret as it is always the working class that takes the brunt of the foibles of incessant government intervention.

The cut also implicitly implies The Fed overplayed its hand and is concerned about a recession.

Prematurely cutting interest rates is the perfect recipe for an increase in inflation. The dollar lost 20% of its value in just three plus years turning greenbacks into proverbial toilet paper.

The Fed’s rate cut in a supposed stable and growing economy only kicks the inflation can farther down the road until after November’s election.

How politically expedient.